If I were to travel 290 million km to get somewhere, I'd like to think it was worth staying around, at least for a cup of tea. The Japanese probe that has just completed this distance to reach an asteroid called Itokawa only planned to land for one second before heading home. In the event, it hung around for a full half hour before lifting off again, such was the draw of the asteroid.
Its original plan equates to popping over to New York from London for 0.00002 seconds (from a distance travelled vs. time spent at destination perspective), while its revised schedule equates to loitering around for an unseemly 0.35 seconds.
The Father Christmas project is a comedic coup on the part of all involved. DNA scientists are trying to figure out whether there was a single male ancestor for all of the people with a surname of Christmas, thus making him the ultimate Father Christmas.
As an amusing aside, for Father Christmas to visit everyone on Christmas day, he would spend around 0.000013 seconds administering the needs of each person, that is of course assuming that everyone's been good. I've only given him 24 hours to get round to everyone, although in reality, he may get around 32 hours if he were to start in Oz and get back to the date line before people woke at 8am.
